1. Field of the Invention
This invention is in the technical area of call centers, and pertains more particularly to creating statistics for a call center.
2. Description of Related Art
Call centers are typically organizations of telephone switches, computerized servers and agent stations inter-related by networks. The telephone switches are typically connected to Publically Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN), cellular telephone networks, and the Internet (for data-packet telephony). In a local call center most stations and computerized resources are inter-connected by a local area network (LAN), but there may also be more remote hardware and software resources, and agents as well interfacing by a wide area network, which may be the well-known Internet network.
Call center technology is a rapidly-growing field, and has been so for some time, so modern call centers can be very large organizations, encompassing hundreds or even thousands of agents manning agent stations, and handling tens of thousands of calls.
In operation of call centers it is vitally important to have at least near real-time information concerning the state of resources, such as agent activity and availability, calls in queue, and much more. This information is used to plan resource adjustment, pace operations and to enable many other functions.
In most call centers there is therefore an operation termed Stat-Server in the art, which is a term used to refer to a computerized server appliance, or a group of such appliances, network connected to the agent stations and many other servers inter-related in the call center. The Stat Server executes powerful software from a non-transitory physical medium, and the software provides functionality for accepting data from many other points in the call center, monitors many call center functions and status, and performs highly-structured computerized operations to maintain and report statistics and status of a wide variety of call center functions in near real time. These status reports and statistics are vital in operation of any call center, which would quickly fail without such functions.
It was described above that call centers have evolved to a point that a single call center may have thousands of agents and may handle tens of thousands of calls. Moreover, there are federations of call centers, interfaced, for example, over the Internet, and the trend is to ever larger and larger operations.
In earlier days of call center technology, where a call center might have, for example twenty agent stations, manned by agents to handle perhaps a few hundred calls per day, a Stat Server having a single processing unit (node) and moderate computer power, was adequate to provide the information needed to operate the call center successfully. With the present state of call center technology, parallel processing (multiple nodes) and quite sophisticated software is more and more necessary to provide the real-time information and data needed for successful operation.
With multiple node parallel processing, and the complicated structure of call centers and their complicated functionality, partitioning a call center for parallel processing becomes a necessity, and brings new problems, one of which is inter-node data traffic, which severely limits the real-time desire of Stat Server operations.
What is clearly needed are methods for partitioning that limit inter-node traffic and provide real time operation with minimum computing power.